


linchpin

by crossroadswrite



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Open Ending, Pre-Slash, more implied than anything - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:56:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21604099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossroadswrite/pseuds/crossroadswrite
Summary: The first time he meets him, it’s in a dimly lit bar Victor isn’t even supposed to know exists.
Relationships: Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov
Comments: 61
Kudos: 290
Collections: BaconExchange2019





	linchpin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katheneverwrites (mandolinearts)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mandolinearts/gifts).



> First and foremost the biggest thank you to LadyDrace for continuing to be a gem and betaing my stuff!!!!
> 
> This was written for an exchange in a lovely, lovely server I'm in, and I'm lucky enough to have been given the oportunity to write for the amazingly talented and sweet Kathe, whomst is an angel and I adore more than anything.
> 
> Kathe!!!!! I tried to cater to you at the best of my abilities, I know you really love cyberpunk stuff and urban fantasy stuff, and I'm sorry if this falls a little short of expectations, I really wanted to give you something cool!! And I feel bad that I don't have many spoons to write yoi stuff right now, because you deserve an EPIC, but I hope this is a fun read too!
> 
> Also dw about the tags you know I'm baby, and I can't write anything too bad. I really hope you enjoy it!!!!!

The first time he meets him, it’s in a dimly lit bar Victor isn’t even supposed to know exists.

It’s not exactly the place Victor would frequent, usually, but Chris owns it, and Chris is one of Victor’s few (read: only) friends, so whenever he has a break from work, he likes to make his way here and sit at the counter, washing his loneliness away by making small talk with Chris.

Even if he sticks out like a sore thumb among Chris’ usual clientele. 

His clothes are too bright, too pristine, lacking any of the grime that comes with living in the city. The stench of smog doesn’t cling to Victor like it clings to the rest of the patrons. One of the perks of working for one of the multimillion dollar companies that owns the country, he supposes.

None of the patrons try to interact with him. If his clothes weren’t enough of a deterrent the heavy band around his neck is. In another time, it might’ve been mistaken for a necklace or a choker, the silver metal sitting snugly against his throat with intricate designs etched onto it. Until you look closer and realize it’s not indents in the metal that make up the designs on it but very fine electrical hardware.

Anyone who looks at it recognizes it for the collar that it is. The price to pay for living a cushy life away from the grit and violence of the city is being owned.

Victor can’t take a single breath without them knowing exactly where he is and the condition is body is in: heart rate, blood pressure, hydration levels, ingested calorie count….

As if that was necessary with his ever present security detail. Victor is important enough,  _ valuable _ enough that he needs to be monitored every time he steps outside of the building he works and lives in, lest he get any ideas and try to make a run for it.

He’s not stupid enough to the point of ever trying. He’d like to keep breathing, thank you very much.

Chris’ bar is like a balm to him. He gets to sit and drink and forget for a little bit.

Victor loves how Chris keeps the lights dimmed, such a stark contrast to how headache-inducing the fluorescent lights in ISU’s offices are, or how blinding the neon signs outside are.

Victor likes to sit and pretend he has some sort of anonymity in this semi-darkness, even if he knows better. Even when he knows no one would dare approach him.

No one ever has before. Not until  _ him _ .

Victor doesn’t hear him come in, or come closer. He only notices there’s someone sitting beside him when the bar stool next to his is pulled back.

The noise startles him, and Victor turns his head just in time to see a man sit down.

The first thing that catches his attention are his clothes. Or better speaking, the first thing that catches his attention is the sharp contrast between his blue bomber jacket and the katana strapped to his back.

Victor blinks at him, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing, trying to make sense of the fact that someone just waltzed into Chris’ establishment with a weapon strapped to their back.

Open carry is forbidden. Carrying something more dangerous than a butter knife in public will land you in jail for a solid year.

That alone should make Victor steer clear of the man, but then his eyes tick to his profile and he can’t make himself stop staring at the sharp cut of his jaw line, the strong angle of his eyebrows.

And then he turns his head towards Victor and Victor thinks he sees a flash of golden before their eyes land on each others’. Victor blinks away the spots in his vision, and tries to focus on the  ~~ dull red ~~ liquid brown of this stranger’s eyes. He blinks several times again and drops his gaze away, finding he can’t really hold eye contact for long.

The stranger is still staring at him, and when Victor chances another look, focusing his eyes somewhere on his eyebrow, the stranger tilts his head, brows creasing into a frown.

“Do I know you?” he asks.

Victor blinks at him, tries to take a long and hard look at this strangers’ features to see if it jogs anything in his memory, but it remains blank.

Victor’s memory is, historically, awful, but not even he could forget a face like this, he thinks. Because this stranger is undeniably handsome in a way that hits all of Victor’s buttons, from the line of his jaw, to the long eyelashes, to the strong eyebrows, to the long hair tied severely in a ponytail high on his head.

“I think I’d remember if we’d met before,” Victor says, wetting his lips with his tongue when he finds his mouth is suddenly dry.

He doesn’t miss how this stranger’s eyes dip to track the motion, and he finds himself having to blink spots from his vision again.

He tilts his chin up towards the ceiling and wonders if there’s something wrong with Chris’ lights.

“Hmm,” the stranger hums.

“Maybe you’ve seen me in a scientific magazine before.”

The stranger’s eyes widen. “Victor Nikiforov,” he says suddenly. “You work for the ISU.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Victor says and smiles a little. It’s not something he’s particularly proud of, but it’s also something he doesn’t really have a choice in.

The stranger’s eyes drop to his collar, and his mouth presses into a thin line. “You’re usually not wearing that in the pictures.”

Victor touches his fingers to it self-consciously and wishes he had brought a scarf with him.

“They photoshop it out, usually,” he says.

“I see,” the stranger says, and there’s an edge to his voice that Victor can’t quite put his finger to. It makes goosebumps raise at the back of his neck, makes him want to stand as still as possible, muscles locked tight with tension.

“You have me at a disadvantage,” he says, and tries for a charming smile. “You know my name but I don’t know yours.”

The stranger looks back up to him, eyes finally leaving the collar around his throat.

There’s two seconds of silence, as if he can’t decide what to say, before finally settling on, “Yuuri. My name’s Yuuri.”

“Nice to meet you,  _ Yuu _ ri.”

“You- you too,” Yuuri says, and if Victor wasn’t paying such close attention to him he might’ve missed the way his cheeks turn pink.

“So, what brings you here?” Victor asks, trying to make conversation.

Yuuri looks down at the counter and says, “Just here for a drink.”

“Let me get you one,” Victor says, and flags Chris over.

He doesn’t miss the way Chris’ eyes stay on Yuuri for a second too long, widening with recognition, but doesn’t greet him.

He orders Yuuri a beer as he splutters through how Victor doesn’t have to,  _ no, really please, there’s no need _ . But Victor wants to, and he’s curious enough about this man to buy him a drink at the very least.

They sit and talk for a while. Yuuri is shyer than Victor was expecting, but he doesn’t try to shut Victor off or end the conversation, so Victor keeps prodding him with questions, interested in what he has to say.

“I have to ask,” Victor says, when he’s on his fourth glass and Yuuri is on his second. “What’s up with the weaponry? I’m surprised Chris lets you stay when you’re carrying a blade like that.”

“Oh, it’s not- not a blade,” Yuuri says, and reaches back for the handle of the katana, pulling it free.

In his periphery, Victor can see one of his security guards get up from the booth they had been occupying, hand going to their waist. Yuuri shows Victor the katana which… really can’t be called that. He wasn’t wrong when he said it wasn’t a blade, because there isn’t one. All there is, is the handle.

The grip is long, Victor could probably wrap both of his hands around it, the guard is straight and severe, sitting perpendicular to the grip, and then there’s the blade collar that sits on the other side of the guard and is probably what keeps the hilt from falling off its sheath given that there’s no blade attached.

“It’s decorative,” Yuuri says, showing it to Victor.

“May I?” he asks, gesturing towards it, because  _ surely _ there must be some kind of trick to it.  _ Surely _ .

Except if there is one then he has no idea what it might be. There doesn’t seem to be any secret mechanism or button to press. The hilt is made of wood, in fact the whole thing, as beautifully detailed as it is, seems to be entirely made of wood. There isn’t a single piece of metal in it.

Victor turns it in his hands again and again and he’s sure he’s missing something, but no matter how much he looks at it, he can’t figure out what that something might be.

He passes it back to Yuuri.

“It’s beautiful,” he says.

“Thank you.”

“You must get stopped a lot because of it.”

Yuuri laughs a little and doesn’t look at him. “Not as much as you’d think.”

He has a cute laugh, Victor thinks, and wonders if it’s weird that he gets caught staring at his mouth, at how his lips pull back over his  ~~ sharp canines ~~ teeth. It’s charming, and if Victor was allowed such things, he might try to take Yuuri home with him.

Victor opens his mouth to say something, and is interrupted by Yuuri’s glass tipping over, spraying beer onto Yuuri’s lap, making him yelp and jump up.

“Ah, I’m so sorry, I’ll get you another one,” Chris says, handing Yuuri a wad of napkins and grabbing a washcloth to mop up the spill.

Yuuri clutches the napkins in his hand, looking down at them for a second, before he starts wiping his pants off.

“Ah, that’s okay, that’s okay,” Yuuri hurries to say. “I think I’ll go to the bathroom to clean this up, be right back.”

He drops the napkins on the desk and grabs the katana handle, putting it back in his sheath with practiced ease.

Chris grabs the crumpled napkins as soon as they hit the counter and throws them in the trash, and the only reason Victor notices is because of how fast he moves to do it. Victor squints at the trashcan behind the counter, wondering what that was about, before Chris steps into his line of sight and puts another beer in front of Yuuri’s spot.

The beer goes flat before long.

Victor stays until closing time, waiting. He doesn’t see Yuuri again that night.

«»

The second time he sees Yuuri he’s not sure he actually sees him.

Victor is working when there’s a breach in security, and he’s quickly ushered to the safest room in the building – the security room – where he can be monitored and kept out of the way.

The door is locked behind him and the other personnel valuable enough to be kept out of harm’s way. They all stand around with a couple of people from security, staring at a veritable wall of screens, each of them showing the many, many,  _ many _ security cameras in the building.

Victor’s eyes flicker through them, noting how more than a handful are only displaying static which is… almost impossible.

These security cameras don’t really  _ break _ unless extensive damage has been done to them. Even in the case of a building-wide blackout, there’s a secondary generator  _ just _ to keep the cameras running.

His eyes catch on movement in one of the cameras and he turns to it, expecting to see some of the security personnel running around, but what he sees instead is someone wearing a blue bomber jacket, a hood pulled up obscuring their features, and a katana strapped to their back as they jog away.

Victor’s eyes shift to the next camera over, one he knows will catch the person’s face, and it does but just for a second. Victor barely has time to process what he sees: strong eyebrows, a face mask that covers half their face, a flash of gold, before the camera fizzles into static.

His eyes shift around from camera to camera, trying to track their progress, but he can’t find him again.

They stay in that room for six hours while the building is cleared.

They don’t find anyone in the end, and they don’t know what has been stolen if anything, nor do they have any clue who the intruder was.

Victor keeps his mouth shut, and gets back to work.

«»

Third time is the charm, as they say. Or third time is the terrifying near death experience.

It’s all a terrible spur of the moment decision, and Victor knows deep in his gut that he’ll die for it. But better die like this than the alternative. He couldn’t live with himself if he turned a blind eye to this. That’s how he finds himself running through the filthy streets as acid rain beats down on him, pain lacing sharply down his spine as his collar pulses against his throat, a kid safely tucked in his arms.

Victor was willing to overlook a lot of things. He was more than content with manipulating ISU’s research from the inside, making them run into dead ends again and again and again to, if not stop, at the very least stall their more nefarious ambitions.

It wasn’t a happy life, but it was a purposeful one.

And then they had shoved a kid into his lab so carelessly the boy had stumbled and fallen on the floor, and said, “Here’s your lab rat,” even as the child glared up at them with hatred in his eyes, and it was like looking in a mirror.

Victor looked down at this kid and could still feel the harsh unforgiving cold of tile slamming against his knees and palms, the bruises around his wrist and arms from being manhandled, the swirling rage and loss in the pit of his stomach.

Victor looked at this kid and was ten years old all over again, being wrenched from his home and thrown into a van, having a collar strapped around his neck, scraping himself raw to survive.

“What’s your name?” Victor asks.

“Yuri,” the kid spits out, transferring his glare to him, and it almost feels like a sign of some sort.

It should be a harder decision, he thinks. But it’s not.

Victor’s been passive for years and years now, and it’s almost ridiculously easy to slip through security and onto the streets. Blowing up the lab probably helped in that regard.

The guards still catch up, because of course they do, and Victor doesn’t really have a plan, living in isolation like he has, except for  _ get the kid to safety _ .

The rain makes it almost impossible to see anything in front of his face, and Victor tries to turn corners into tighter and tighter streets in a desperate attempt to either lose them, or at the very least make sure they can only follow them on foot.

And because Victor hasn’t experienced a single second of luck in his entire life, he turns straight into a dead end, and doesn’t have time to turn back around.

The people sent after them stand at the mouth of the alley, guns drawn, as Victor backs away slowly, clutching Yuri tighter against him until his back hits the wall.

The kid’s shivering in his arms, and Victor’s muscles keep spasming rhythmically every time the collar sends a pulse of pain through him, designed to incapacitate in case of escape.

It hurts, it hurts a  _ lot _ , but If they wanted it to completely incapacitate Victor they shouldn’t have built his pain tolerance so high when he was younger.

“Fuck,” he says, looking around wildly for any escape route.

Yuri’s fingers in his clothes tighten, before they relax.

“Thanks for trying,” he whispers, and Victor can hear the resignation, the defeat. He clutches him tighter in response.

“Professor,” one of them calls. “It’s time to go back.”

No, no, no. Not like this, not like this.

He looks around again but it’s so dark and the rain is relentless. He can’t see anything and the buildings around him are too tall to climb. There’s no open window in sight, no convenient exit.

They’re trapped, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m-“ He starts buckling under their combined weight, and falls on his knees on the ground, curling around Yuri protectively.

Something lands in the middle of the alleyway with a heavy thud and a splash.

Victor’s breath stalls in his chest as he tries to blink the rain out of his eyes.

He can make out the figure of a person and nothing much else. He glances up again and wonders where they came from. It’s a long way down from any of those buildings. Not a fall anyone could take without shattering their ankles at the very least.

He watches the figure pull something from their back and hold it at their side, sliding into a fighting stance Victor’s only seen weapon masters use in old movies. The person is very clearly holding a sword, but Victor can’t see any blade, or at least he can’t until the dark is lit up by a violent flash of electric blue, curving into the shape of a blade and sprouting from the hilt the person had been holding.

Victor can only stare wide-eyed, barely breathing. He wonders distantly what it’s made of. It looks like fire from where he’s standing, blue and unstable. The rain sizzles as it touches it.

Victor hears the sound of guns being discharged and expects to see the person fall, but instead he sees bright blue cutting through the darkness, and the person keeps standing.

He moves Yuri towards his back, putting his body between him and the fight happening in front of him.

He can hear incomprehensible shouting, can hear feet pounding through puddles as his enforcers charge this person. It lasts barely a minute. All he can see is blue moving through the alley in precise arcs. He barely sees the person move, or better, they move so fast Victor can barely comprehend it.

Barely one minute is how long the fight lasts, and then the figure is turning towards them, face obscured by a hood and a face mask, but eyes burning into them, two twin spots of golden staring them down as they advance, katana still ignited at their side.

Victor can see them better as they come closer, and relief and confusion slam into him.

“Yuuri,” he breathes, and then his lungs stop working altogether when in a quick move Yuuri holds the blade against his neck.

It’s warm, Victor notices. Scaldingly so, and he swallows convulsively, and tries to tip his head back and away.

“Don’t move,” Yuuri says.

Victor goes as still as he can make himself go.

He feels the heat of the blade move up his neck in a sharp move, before Yuuri draws it back to his side, and the flame goes out.

The collar falls away from Victor’s throat and lands on the ground with a clink, and then Yuuri is kneeling down, peering at the kid clutching at Victor like a lifeline, and then at Victor himself.

He pulls his face mask down.

“Hi again,” he says, sounding a little bashful, as if he didn’t just take on a handful of highly trained gunmen by himself.

“Hi,” Victor says. “Your eyes are glowing,” he tells him, in case Yuuri isn’t aware.

Yuuri blinks a couple of times, and the colour fades to that same dull red, except that isn’t right is it? Victor remembers them as being brown.

And then Victor blinks and he knows he remembered right because they are brown now.

“Sorry,” he says, and Victor has no idea what he’s apologizing for. “We should get out of the rain,” he says, and stands up again. He offers Victor a hand up.

Victor eyes it warily for a second, hesitating.

Yuri’s hands curl in the fabric at his shoulders. He’s still shivering, and that makes Victor’s choice easy.

He takes Yuuri’s hand and lets himself be pulled up. Yuuri’s hand is warm in his freezing one, and he doesn’t let go.

This might be the stupidest thing Victor’s ever done, or the best, but he doesn’t really have time to consider it before they’re running down the alley and away, Yuuri pulling him through the streets with a certainty that speaks of familiarity.

Victor follows and never looks back.

**Author's Note:**

> and then they jump started revolution and became badass magical sword yielding husbands
> 
> [tumblr](https://crossroadswrite.tumblr.com) | [twitter](https://twitter.com/crossroadswrite)


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